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‘The Mourner’s Friend or Sighs of Sympathy For Those Who Sorrow’ is a collection of prose and verse compiled to give comfort to the grieving. Edited by J.B. Syme, published in 1852 by S.A. Howland in Worcester, Mass, USA; its contents are by American and European authors including some surprisingly famous names.

Charles Sprague (1791-1875) was from a prominent Boston family, descendent from the ‘founding fathers’, and a successful career Banker. He was also a popular, award-winning published poet known for his public readings. This particular poem was first published in the 1837 edition of ‘Boston Book’ when the author was 46 years of age. It must have been popular considering the renowned female composer Miss Augusta Browne (sounds like a fearless creative maverick herself!) composed music to the poem and it was published as sheet music available to the public in 1842. A frontispiece appears to the right courtesy of Levy Sheet Music.

The Family Meeting leads the reader into a happy family gathering, warm and loving; a celebration of this welcome happenstance. From the second stanza the melancholy of grief for those missing embellishes the picture with emotional nuance. Death has taken family members, and although all who are living are gathered, the memory of those missing is never too far. Love remains, and bittersweet as it may be they are there in spirit, in their hearts, and memories, always there in the family meeting.

In a notation of the published piece in 1837 the postscript line acknowledgement was printed: ‘These lines were written on occasion of the accidental meeting of all the surviving members of a family, the father and mother of which, one eighty-two, the other eighty years old, have lived int he same house fifty-three years.’

Charles was the father of four children himself, two of which died in childhood.

THE FAMILY MEETING.

WE are all here !
Father, Mother,
Sister, Brother,
All who hold each other dear.
Each chair is filled, – we’re all at home ;
To night let no cold stranger come :
It is not often thus around
Or old familiar hearth we’re found :
Bless, then, the meeting and the spot ;
For once be every care forgot :
let gentle Peace assert her power,
And kind Affection rule the hour ;
We’re all – all here.

We’re not all here !
Some are away, – the dead ones dear,
Who thronged with us this ancient hearth,
And gave the hour to guiltless mirth.
Fate, with a stern, relentless hand,
Looked in and thinned our little band:

Some like a night-flash passed away,
And some sank, lingering day by day ;
The quiet graveyard, – some lie there, –
And cruel Ocean has his share, –
We’re not all here.

We are all here !
Even they, – the dead, – though dead, so dear;
Fond Memory, to her duty true,
Brings back their faded forms to view.
How life-like, through the mist of years,
Each well-remembered face appears !
We see them as in times long past,
From each to each kind looks are cast ;
We hear their words, their smiles behold;
They’re round us, as they were of old, –
We are all here.

We are all here !
Father, Mother,
Sister, Brother,
You that I love with love so dear.This may not long of us be said ;
Soon must we join the gathered dead ;
And by the hearth we now sit round,
Some other circle will be found.
O, then, that wisdom may we know,
Which yields a life of peace below !
So, in the world to follow this,
May each repeat, in words of bliss,
We’re all – all here !

I am lucky enough to have in my personal library a book entitled ‘The Mourner’s Friend or Sighs of Sympathy For Those Who Sorrow’. It is a collection of prose and verse compiled to give comfort to the grieving. Edited by J.B. Syme, published in 1852 by S.A. Howland in Worcester, Mass, USA; its contents are by American and European authors including some surprisingly famous names. My copy of the book has some water damage, ageing paper, and precarious binding, so before it deteriorates my project to preserve the words of the authors will find its way here on the MOLAM blog.

This is one of a number of pieces by Longfellow in this compilation. “He comes as the poet of melancholy, courtesy, deference—poet of all sympathetic gentleness—and universal poet of women and young people. I should have to think long if I were ask’d to name the man who has done more and in more valuable directions, for America.”

Aptly, this is dedicated to the creative genius, the artist Mr Prince Rogers Nelson (7 June 1958 – 21 April 2016); Champion of art, Champion of women artists, Gift.

THE GRAVE OF GENIUS. By Longfellow.

IT has become a common saying, that men of genius are always in advance of their age ; which is true. There is something equally true, yet not so common ; namely, that, of these men of genius, the best and bravest are in advance not only of their own age, but of every age. As the German prose-poet says, every possible future is behind them. We cannot suppose, that a period of time will ever come, when the world, or any considerable portion of it, shall have come up abreast with these great minds, so as fully to comprehend them.

And oh ! how majestically they walk in history ; some like the sun, with all his travelling glories round him ; other wrapped in gloom, yet glorious as a night with stars. Through the else silent darkness of the past, the spirit hears their slow and solemn footsteps. Onward they pass, like those hoary elders seen in the sublime vision of an earthly paradise, attendant angels bearing golden lights before them, and, above and behind ,the whole air painted with seven-listed colors, as from the trails of pencils !

And yet, on earth, these men were not happy, – not all happy, in the outward circumstance of their lives. They were in want, and in pain, and familiar with prison-bars, and the damp, weeping walls of dungeons ! Oh, I have looked with wonder upon those, who, in sorrow and privation, and bodily discomfort, and sickness, which is the shadow of death, have worked right on to the accomplishment of their great purposes ; toiling much, enduring much, fulfilling much ; – and then, with shattered nerves, and sinews all unstrung, have laid themselves down in the grave, and slept the sleep of death, – and the world talks of them, while they sleep !

It would seem, indeed, as if all their sufferings had but sanctified them ! As if the death-angel, in passing, had touched them with the hem of his garment, and made them holy ! As if the hand of disease had been stretched out over them only to make the sign of the cross upon their souls ! And as in the sun’s eclipse we can behold the great stars shining in the heavens, so in this life-eclipse have these men beheld the lights of the great eternity, burning solemnly and forever !

Oh My Goodness, it is the last moment of the year when we can squeeze in those final drops of thoughts and words all about our dearest selves in the 2,015th Year of Our Lord. Let us not dwell on lessons learned (or nearly), let us think about us, and what we can put off until tomorrow!

Welcome back to our annual tradition and a Bonne Année Mes Amis from us all.

Auditory beauty, let it be nurtured and lived this forthcoming year.

No person of decency, still less delicacy, will be guilty of a double entendre. A well-bred person always refuses to understand a phrase of doubtful meaning. If the phrase may be interpreted decently, and with such interpretation would provoke a smile, then smile to just the degree called for by such interpretation, and no more. – ‘Decorum: A Treatise on Etiquette and Dress’, 1880 (and Miss April’s Bible).

Double entendre – deliver them often, wittily and well. Laugh with a cheeky chuckle or a riotous raucousness, depending on how much champagne has been quaffed.

Style over fashion, always.

If it is within your power, ban all shorts.

The wearing of flat lace-ups on a lady is not to be celebrated. Be mindful of commenting upon them as no doubt the wearer is obliged to don them due to catastrophic injury.

Listen.

Vulnerability is not a dirty word, in fact, it could save your life, but it requires a fearless kind of determination and a lot of practice.

Your behaviour does not lie.

Wear more turbans. Now add jewels. Do not forget the drapery.

To love is to love Nature for we are but a small part of her and need her desperately. Best wishes to you and your loved ones. Stay tuned for 2016!

I am lucky enough to have in my personal library a book entitled ‘The Mourner’s Friend or Sighs of Sympathy For Those Who Sorrow’. It is a collection of prose and verse compiled to give comfort to the grieving. Edited by J.B. Syme, published in 1852 by S.A. Howland in Worcester, Mass, USA; its contents are by American and European authors including some surprisingly famous names. My copy of the book has some water damage, ageing paper, and precarious binding, so before it deteriorates my project to preserve the words of the authors will find its way here on the MOLAM blog.

This poetic piece of prose in honour of a mother’s love has no acknowledged author, which is not unusual, but leads me to believe it was a woman. The tone makes me suspect she had a very direct experience of loss herself, or observed that in someone very close to her. There are a few interesting observations to make about this piece, firstly that it appeared to have been published in abbreviated format in the New England Farmer and Horticultural Journal of June 3 1835 – a good 17 years before it was published here. The version terminated at the line: ‘goes to the grave to weep there’, which is quite a beautiful line to stop at. Interestingly, and not unusually, it has some discrepancies in quotation marks and an odd word here and there. Why create quotations? Usually to reference biblical verse or popular literary knowledge – in this piece we have 3 likely biblical references, not all quoted below, but in the linked version above. “seeks it in the morning” could reference Isaiah 26:9 – yearning for God, for meaning, for salvation during the night, through the night and seeking it in the morning – will this search ever end? Will morning bring relief? “I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning” references Genesis 37:35 and pertinently speaks of Jacob’s lament for the (perceived) loss of his son Joseph. In this version the telling line is not in quotations, but it is in the 1835 version “she goes to the grave to weep there”, and it is also the final line of the earlier published article. A line which ponders the very ethics of mourning as it references John 11:31 when Mary prostrates herself to Jesus begging for reprieve at the death of her brother Lazarus. It worked. Would you do it?

A MOTHER’S TEARS.

THERE is a sweetness in a mother’s tears when they fall on the face of a dying babe, which no eye can behold with heart untouched. It is holy ground, upon which the unhallowed foot of profanity dares not encroach. Infidelity itself is silent and forbears her mocking ; and here woman shows not her weakness, but her strength ; it is strength of attachment which man never did nor ever can feel. It is perennial ; dependent on no climate, no changes, nor soil, but, alike in storms as in sunshine, it knows no shadow of turning. A father, when he sees his child going down the valley, may weep when the shadow of death has full come over him, and as the last departing knell falls on his ears, may say : “I will go down into the grave unto my son mourning,” but he turns away ; in the hurry of business the tear is wiped, and though, when he returns to his fireside, the sportive laugh comes up to his remembrance, the succeeding day blunts the poignancy of his grief, and it finds no permanent seal. Not so with her who has borne and nourished the tender blossom. It lives in the heart where it was first entwined in the dreamy hours of night. She sees its playful mirth, or plaintive cries ; she “seeks it in the morning,” and she goes to the grave to weep there. Its little toys are carefully laid aside as mementos to keep continually alive that thrilling anguish which the dying struggle and sad look produces ; and though grief, like a canker-worm, may be gnawing at her vitals, yet she finds a luxury in her tears, a sweetness in her sorrow, which none but a mother ever tasted.

I have a technical problem, I think. It’s not the medication like last time.

Any way I thought this data retention thing the government was offering sounded great. My hard drive is so slow, due to the enormous amount of images and films I like to have handy. Those things take up digital space and not in a fun way.

So excited by this govt cloud that just keeps everything on your computer in the free Canberra archive, I deleted all my selfies and auto videography. I don’t seem to be able to access the data retention cloud however. It’s a real problem. I have potential new friends on Tinder, Grinder , Emission Impossible and other social networking sites I’m desperate to share some of my most impressive and ,dare I say , unrepeatable personal events, that I managed record ,mostly unassisted.

Is there a back door I can access? A password I’m missing ? I’ve tried the education ministers office as communications ministers a bit busy and all I got was a shrill giggle. Must have been a very wrong number.

I need a new way in. Any ideas ?

Yours (for now)
Frequent Fornicator

Yours truly having a jolly good time drying my plums.

Why, if it isn’t my dear friend Frequent Fornicator. It has been some time, my dearest. It bears me well to hear from you, although I’m somewhat flummoxed by the plethora of unknown words which you present.

Data retention sounds like a most uncomfortable ailment for which I recommend a spoonful of cod liver oil and a plump Oriental Agen prune imported via the Silk Route (only the best!). Repeat daily for at least one week (if Our Lord can summon all of creation within 7 days than by golly we can cure data retention and rest for Sundays). No doubt you’ll locate the backdoor access once you feel more yourself.

“Can’t take any more data…must have prunes…” Image: The Art of Brandis

In terms of passwords and ministers, self-portraits, moving images, clouds and new friends; I’m quite sure you’ve got yourself the solid setting and character structure for a damn fine penny dreadful. Just remember, “you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide” so says our trusted Government spokespeople, or was that Joseph Goebbels? Who can tell? (Insert guileless titter). Using that logic you must be our Government’s ideal citizen – you want to share EVERYTHING! Good for you, they should use you as poster boy in all future political campaigns. Placard reads: Frequent Fornicator has nothing to hide and votes 1 Liberal/Labour/EitherOne – Hoorah for political activism!

Yours in the clouds,
Miss April

Postscript: My neighbour just enlightened me via tête-à-tête on the use and purpose of grinders and tinders. Stuff and poppycock. I offer you to consider this instead, an excerpt on courtship advice:

Anciently, talismans and charms were relied on for procuring love ; “but it is now many years since the only talismans for creating love are the charms of the person beloved,: By gracefully displaying those advantages which nature has given, and by diligently cultivating the graces which art can bestow, every man may reasonably hope to succeed in whatever aspirations he may form in this direction. In this field, moral qualities prevail far more than physical ; and while few men are possessed of those attractions of form and face which sometimes are successful, all may hope to acquire those qualifications of character, understanding and manners, which more often win the esteem of woman (or man) (or voters – hint hint Party Politicians).

Heed Miss April’s Advice!

Unburden your woes, share your troubles, correspond with Miss April here! Shh, confidentiality assured!! You can Tweet Miss April and like her on Facebook!

I am lucky enough to have in my personal library a book entitled ‘The Mourner’s Friend or Sighs of Sympathy For Those Who Sorrow’. It is a collection of prose and verse compiled to give comfort to the grieving. Edited by J.B. Syme, published in 1852 by S.A. Howland in Worcester, Mass, USA; its contents are by American and European authors including some surprisingly famous names. My copy of the book has some water damage, ageing paper, and precarious binding, so before it deteriorates my project to preserve the words of the authors will find its way here on the MOLAM blog.

A poem and a hymn written by Thomas Hood (1799-1845) shows poignancy in its antithetical ideal Victorian death – a missing, a loss, the moment not being shared – the unideal Victorian death.

THE DEATH-BED. By Thomas Hood.

WE watched her breathing through the night,
Her breathing soft and low,
As on her breast the wave of life
Kept heaving to and fro.

So silently we seemed to speak,
So slowly moved about,
As we had lent her half our powers
To eke her being out.

Our very hopes belied our fears,
Our fears our hopes belied;
We thought her dying when she slept,
And sleeping when she died.

For when the morn came dim and sad,
And chill with early showers,
her quiet eyelids closed; – she had
Another morn than ours.

I am lucky enough to have in my personal library a book entitled ‘The Mourner’s Friend or Sighs of Sympathy For Those Who Sorrow’. It is a collection of prose and verse compiled to give comfort to the grieving. Edited by J.B. Syme, published in 1852 by S.A. Howland in Worcester, Mass, USA; its contents are by American and European authors including some surprisingly famous names. My copy of the book has some water damage, ageing paper, and precarious binding, so before it deteriorates my project to preserve the words of the authors will find its way here on the MOLAM blog.

We create alternate states, try to make sense of unimaginable emotions, and evoke extraordinary creatures and worlds to make sense of what it means to be here, and to feel what we feel. The words of Reverend William Rogers are committed to help those who have lost the most precious thing they can lose.

In all likelihood Reverend William Rogers is the one and same as the English champion for free public education, rational espouser of prostitution licences to protect women from Jack the Ripper and the man of God encouraging secular education programs (as well as a keen dancer). Interesting fellow. Infant mortality in the 19th Century was high. At times I read it was so high, that people had more pragmatic attitudes toward death and loss. Then you read texts like this, and you realise that loss and grief are universal across cultures and time. The loss of a child, most piercing of all.

This particular piece of prose was earlier published in The Christian Souvenir: An offering for Christmas and the New Year, Isaac Fitzgerald Shepard (editor), London, 1843. The couplet quoted in this piece is from A New-born Child and Its Parent, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).

INFANCY IN DEATH. By Rev. William Rogers.

THE gladness of spring has ever a cast of sadness with it to me. The air is perfumed, indeed, by bud and blossom, as if an angle had shaken his wings around us ; but look you, there are more germs blighted and dead beneath the tree, than clinging yet to the branches. Life is ever in the minority, and that sweet emblem admonishes me how largely young life enters the harvest of death. It seems but natural, when the duties of life have formed and perfected, and when the soul is shut in from the world without, but its decaying senses, and limited to the circle of its own reflections, that the spent energies of age should rest in the grave. But here in infancy, you have death with no faculty developed, and the life which might have been an oak to shelter nations, dying a seedling. Life itself is but a fragment, interposed between eternities ; but here the very fragment is broken, and the living clay, which but an hour ago was stamped with his own image by the hand of God, under the selfsame hand crumbles into dust. That life seems an intention interrupted ; a purpose formed, and, in the very moment of its taking shape, strangely changed. It seems a life with no end but death ; and death, too, where last we should look for it in the varied condition of man. When hallowed love has blended its own nature in the life of the newborn, and,

“For the mother’s sake, the child is dear,
And dearer yet the mother, for the child;”

wherever else the curse on the earth might fall and blight, here last and lightest should we look for it ; but even here Death claims his own.

But let us regard this matter as they to whom God has spoken in words articulate by man, and interpret his providence by a higher than earthly wisdom. That life of a day shall endure with the longest. It was but the title-page we read ; the volume of its being is above. Its absolute existence is the same, whether straitened to an hour, or protracted to threescore years and ten on earth, for it claims immortality as its birthright. we robe the little one in the vestments of death, and bear it out with many tears to the dust that lived before it ; we chisel the record of its life of hours, and of our love, upon the chill marble ; and thus we cheat the heart from truth and fact, while we think and speak of it as dead. It is not dead. It cannot die. It lives, and shall live, with the lifetime of God. It breathed an hour in clay, that we might know that God had created another immortal, and that they whom the child bereft, were honored with its parentage, and then it passed from earth to claim its own.

Follow it, if you will, where it mingles with those of whom the Saviour said, “Their angels do always behold my Father which is in heaven,” the formation of character here is under a probation of many sorrows, but there you have the earthborn trained in heaven. it is among the ministries of angels, and gladness such as the blessed know, and truth from the lips of prophets sanctified, among the records of an eternity past, and the developments of an eternity to come, that it wakens to conscious life. There it mingles with the elder spirits of eternity, and beholds the face of Deity, bright in his brightness, yet itself seen as but a shadow intercepting the intenser glory of the throne. Would you disrobe it of its immortality ? Would you have its faculties, sprung in an hour to giant stature, dwindled to the feebleness of infancy, to enter again the narrow chambers of its mortality ? would you hush the song-perfecting praise from infant lips, and give it back to earth, to die again, and win its weary and doubtful way above ? there was a reason for the mastery of faith in the Shunamite, when her boy was dead, and she answered the inquiry of the prophet, “Is it well with the child ? ” “It is well.” No, let it rest, -remembering, when you look upon an infant dead, that heaven is enlarged.

Brief as the term of a child’s life on earth may be, it has answered the end of its existence. It did not live only to die. It lived to be loved, to stir up within the human breast the strong, quick pulsations of a mother’s and a father’s heart, to which the solitary must ever be strangers. Had it never lived, the place that it filled would have been a blank, and the hearts it warmed, unmoved ; but now, instead of nothingness, there is a memory, which the soul melts with emotions that God has treasured up in parentage. And sad though that memory be, it softens with time, until it seems as if they had but dreamed of an angel.

But its life and death had yet a higher use. In this pilgrimage of ours, we forget that we are banished Paradise, and we attempt to frame another from the grosser elements about us. It seems the end of divine providences to expel us from the Eden we have planted, and with whose power we expected unbroken peace. Banished, we repeat the folly, till the poor weary heart hardly dares to love, and says it will not ; yet it does, though death and the grave are quick to sunder the loved and loving, and then, perchance guided by mercy, it finds in God and truth, and object which it may dare to love, for death only brings us nearer to God, and there is no grave in heaven.

God has many voices in this world, in his varied providence, and though they speak in no dialect of man, they are clear and well understood. It is the anticipation of spirit-communion hereafter. But among them all, whether loud or low, whether wrathful or tender, there is none, which does so move the heart to think of God, as the still lips of INFANCY IN DEATH.